Childs Play

I guess most model railroaders at some time have tried to explain “The Others” that model building is really a hobby for adults.
Well,this picture is not a good choice to back up the argument:

It was just meant to be another “work in progress” picture of a sawmill project in 0-scale, I discovered later that it had sort of an infantile quality!

Here are some more mature pictures of the project:

It was by no means childs play to get the tops of the pillars really level. I ended up making a separate board with the holes drilled with a drillpress. The holes “on site” was drilled slighly larger with a hand drill than the dowels.

Code 83 rail was spiked to the pillars after predrilling holes for the spikes. The wood in the dowels is suprisingly hard, and even spiking into endwood was impossible without predrilling. In any case, predrilling avoids the risk of splitting.

The sawmill is just a small affair, but very common in the countryside in my part of Norway:

On a side note, it is so typical of my non-systematic approch to modelling that my first industry for my *mining* railroad is a sawmill. You would think that an ore bin or something would be a more logical choice. But as they say, common sense ain´t all that common.

By the way, here is a picture of the ore bin I will choose for my *next* project:

It is gold in them thar hills!

This weekend it was time for another out of town experince. Some friends have a cabin in the mountains very close to the mainline between Oslo and Trondheim.

A bonus in addition to the great food, wine, company and general scenery is that that the area is very interesting from a modellers point of view. It might in fact be one of the most spectacular stretches on the Norwegian railway network. A lot of classic images like this have been taken in this mountain pass:

The locations around the actual railroad are very familier to me, but I have never drifted very far from the railroad tracks.

So I was totally taken by suprise when we came by this old roadbridge when we went for a little hike today:

Sort of looks like a Colorado narrow gauge railroad bridge!

You can´t carve this, individual stones is the only route to go, me thinks.

The other abutement is cast concrete for variety, the builders knew how to please a modeller!

Nice bridge, but would we like it even better with a set of rusty, narrow gauge tracks? Oh, yes we would.

It´s time to check the drawers for Grandt Line NBWs!

This bridge of course cries out to be modelled. Fortunately, the local Model Railroad club has a large scene that is based on this area. Maybe I will pass this one on to a fellow clubmember, but then maybe I will not…

Another project started

I have the attention span of a gnat, so I launch new projects at an alarming rate. Of course, few of them are ever finished.
One of my future projects is a saloon coach in 0m gauge:

Since the main focus will be on the fantastic interior of the coach, the mechanism must be strictly under the floor.

I found some inspiration for how to approach the problem of building powered trucks on the website of the excellent british modelling collective, Clag.
I have a bit more space to play with than these 4mm scale (1/76 ) modellers, so I began toying with the idea of using a somewhat larger Faulhaber precision motor with an integrated gearhead.

I purchased an 15mm X 12mm motor (Including the gear!) from an german company named Lemo Solar to test the concept . The plan is to use up to 4 traction motors just like the prototype.

The size of the motor looks just right besides the wheelset it is supposed to power:

But what about sound? For some reason I suspected that such small gearheads could be real whiners, and I did not want to invest in 4 of the little buggers just to find out that they screamed like a choir of banshees.

So I recorded the sound of the engine and compared it to the engine I used for the mechansm of my Westinghouse engine. That engine is whisper quiet and a really smooth runner.

Here are the results:
Sound recording of 1512 motor (.waw)
Sound rcording of 2224 motor (.waw)

The sound of the geared motor is not that bad, remember that the mtor was placed almost on the top of the microphone. The second recording sounds quite noisy, but in reality, that engine as mentioned above is really quiet.

This might seem a strange subject to make such a fuzz about, but I am planning to run my models “al fresco” with no artificial sound added, so I want the model motors to sound nice on their own. No sound decoder in other words.

But if these tiny babie really work in practice remains to be seen. I will get another 1512 motor, and make a working dummy. Not a lot of parts involved to make a working boggie, really. Four pulley wheels, four teflon bearings and two sideframes.

Sounds like something even I should be able to finish!